Striking Murder

by AJ Wright

  And ‘somebody’s mother’ bowed low her head,

  In her home that night and the prayer she said,

  ‘Was God be kind to the noble boy,

  Who is somebody’s son and pride and joy.’

  The train was inside the tunnel now, its whistling becoming a roar that filled its cavernous depths with a wild and frenzied crescendo as the steam blasted the underside of the tunnel with nowhere to go. The starling blinked, gave Bridie one last glance, and soared upwards to be with its family high on the rim of the bridge.

  She thought of a man whose blood slowly froze as it oozed from his chest.

  And then she felt the iron track rattle beneath her feet.

  ‘Holy Mother of God!’ Bridie exclaimed as the train came hurtling from the tunnel’s mouth, steam belching and flames howling like a demon expelled.

  Eddie Cowap was a small, thin man with a permanent scowl on his face. Whenever he spoke, his eyes darted from left to right, never looking people straight in the eye. This gave the impression of shiftiness, of mendacity, although the habit came more from a brutalised childhood and a father whose temper was violently unpredictable. In spite of this, Eddie had grown up, a man with a strong instinct for living off his wits, and with a powerful sense of self-preservation.

  Which was why he had made the offer to speak to Sergeant Brennan. He trusted him, and knew that if anyone could keep him out of the courts, Micky Brennan could.

  He sat in the interview room, nervously folding and unfolding his thin, bony hands and occasionally flicking a glance at the fresh-faced constable standing by the door.

  ‘Now then, Eddie,’ said Brennan in a sombre tone. ‘Not the first time this, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Be a fine, costs, might even get hard labour, eh? Then how’ll the wife manage?’

  Eddie pressed both hands together in a parody of prayer.

  ‘And how many children?’

  ‘Six.’

  ‘That’s a lot of empty mouths, Eddie, what with you in prison an’ all.’

  Eddie gave a rueful smile. ‘Last time I was in Strangeways, I got a good hidin’.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Bloody flies.’

  ‘Flies?’ Brennan watched his hands spread open in a declaration of honesty.

  ‘I bet ’em they couldn’t guess how many dead flies was in a glass jar. They could see ’em through t’glass. So they reckoned it was easy money. “Daft Wiganer,” they said. Smart-arses from Salford. So I took their ha’pennies and their farthings and lifted the jar up. Thing is, they couldn’t see the little bugger I had squashed under the top of the jar lid. That made ’em all one out. Reckoned I’d rogued ’em.’

  ‘Well you had rogued them, Eddie.’

  ‘Fair enough, but they knocked me all round yon chapel.’

  ‘You gambled in a chapel?’

  ‘’Course.’

  Brennan shook his head. ‘So. What have you got to tell me?’

  ‘You’ll see your way to lettin’ me go?’

  ‘Depends.’

  Brennan saw the young constable shift his stance. Perhaps he’d been one of those making the arrests last night and resented the idea that the one they spent half of the night in a frozen wood trying to catch should now be offered the luxury of exoneration. But the constable didn’t have Captain Bell breathing down his neck and demanding a rapid conclusion to the murder of his friend.

  ‘Right.’ Eddie looked anxiously down at his hands. Giving the police any sort of information was not the way people from Eddie’s background worked. ‘It’s about Morris. His murder.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Eyes right, eyes left, then down to inspect his fingers.

  ‘I seen him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Chap that has one eye, black patch over t’other.’

  Brennan recalled what Jem Muldoon had said about a one-eyed man asking questions.

  ‘I don’t see how this is relevant, Eddie. I should imagine lots of people saw this man.’

  Eddie bent his head low, and appeared to be inspecting the grain of the wooden table. ‘This one-eyed chap’s been doin’ some business.’

  ‘What kind of business?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Brennan gave an exasperated sigh.

  Eddie looked up quickly. ‘But I do know it’s summat to do with Arthur Morris.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I heard ’im. One night, I happened to find meself in Little London.’

  Brennan knew exactly why Eddie Cowap would be there – it was an area of ramshackle housing and narrow alleys to the north of the town, perfect locations for the interminable games of pitch and toss that blighted the borough, with access to the housing by a very narrow entry that expanded into open space before closing in on itself once more.

  ‘The one-eyed chap, ’e’s talkin’ low-like as they walk past the entry. Keeps askin’ about Arthur Morris an’ says ’e’ll pay well if the other one tells ’im what he wants to know.’

  ‘Who was he talking to, Eddie?’

  Eddie Cowap sat back. It was time for Sergeant Brennan to place his bet.

  ‘There’ll be no charges this time, Eddie. But there’ll be a next time.’

  ‘Wanna bet, Sergeant?’ he smiled and leant forward once more. ‘It was Golden Gob himself who the one-eyed bugger was talkin’ to. Him whose arse they all think the sun shines out of – Frank Latchford.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  There was something different about the house, Andrew felt, as the funeral cortege pulled into the driveway. Not physically, of course. Everything was in its place and the edifice still stood strong and resolute in its dominant and domineering position, a firm reminder of his father and the indomitability of his spirit. But no, he mused, not of the spirit, because that very spirit had now been vanquished. Perhaps the indomitability of the living spirit his father had possessed, unlike the eternal spirit that was even now finding its way to its resting place.

  Why was he behaving like the leader in a varsity debate? Swooping like a vulture on the semantics of another’s argument, gnawing at the inaccuracy with a stubbornness that brought applause and censure at the same time. What did it matter if his father’s spirit were defeated by his murder? And was it heresy to talk about a difference between the living spirit and the eternal one?

  He slowly shook his head. And yet he couldn’t get out of his mind the firm conviction that the place was changed. The closed curtains, with their black drapes all around, seemed to suggest a difference now. A hollowness. His father was gone. He would never return. Strange, too, that he would never hear his voice again, never listen to his words of scorn, of anger, of obstruction. Soon, the curtains would be open again, and the visitors would become more frequent and less hesitant as bereavement drifted its way into history. Even the clothes he wore would, after the requisite period of mourning, for him, at least, be less sombre, indicating a desire to lay the ghosts of the past and move forward. For his mother, her period of mourning was customarily much longer.

  Sitting across from him in the family carriage, she had her head held high beneath the black veil, and Uncle Ambrose was whispering condolences to her, giving the support he, Andrew, should be giving. He was her only child, he was twenty-three years old, and he was leaving it to his father’s brother, a man she tolerated rather than welcomed, to provide the support she so badly needed. Perhaps the one good thing to come from his father’s demise might be a rapprochement between the two of them – certainly Uncle Ambrose was showing her the necessary courtesies, at least.

  He thought of Molly, and for a few seconds allowed her image to float with ethereal grace before his eyes. But, with the inevitability of fate, her face was almost immediately supplanted by that of his father, red-faced and eyes bulbous with rage. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again his father had gone.

  ‘Mam, did you see me? Got him straight in his middle button I did. That’s what we was all aimin’ for
, their middle buttons. Got six runs for that.’

  Tommy Haggerty sat in front of the faintly glowing fire with a proud smile on his face. It had been a good day, what with the fun of running alongside the funeral in town and weaving in and out of all those folk playing Catch Me. Four of them had gone down to watch it, and Tommy was under strict orders not to do anything to disturb the solemnity of the procession. He had given his firm promise that he would not, but chasing each other through the thick crowds had nothing to do with the procession, he argued, and so, suffering the anger of many of those watching, and even, on occasion, getting a thick ear for their mischief, they had had such a good time at the funeral. And then coming back and throwing snowballs at those policemen! He’d scored three direct hits, and his mam hadn’t even been there, not at the beginning anyway.

  He’d seen her come up the street walking slowly, her headscarf flapping loosely around her shoulders and her head bowed low, as if she’d lost something and was searching hard to find it, and she’d gone straight inside, ignoring all the noise and the cheering of the children in the street, and closed the door slowly behind her. He’d left the game to persuade her to come and watch the fun like all the other mams, and, after a full five minutes of arm-tugging and wheedling kisses, she’d finally got up out of her chair and stood in their doorway, and every time he looked after that she was clapping him and talking with Mrs Carter next door and she didn’t have that dark look on her face any more. He liked to see her talk. For the last few days she hadn’t done much of that. She’d been crying a lot and he wondered once more if her heart was still burning.

  ‘Aye you little devil, I saw ye.’

  Bridie sat in her chair, stroking his hair with her fingers the way her own ma had done before the turf fire all those years ago. She wondered if her ma, too, had felt such dour thoughts. Although living with Da must have been very hard for her, especially when he’d been drinking, had she ever contemplated doing what Bridie had that day?

  The very thought made her shudder, and she comforted herself by answering, No, no of course she wouldn’t. Not my ma.

  Did Molly and Tommy have such simple faith in her? Did they have this image of her as some kind of Blessed Virgin come to earth, incapable of anything but the holiest of acts, the purest of actions, the way she thought of her own mother?

  If they did, it was another shame to be added to the ones already blackening her soul. She thanked God then, with a silent prayer, that she had stepped aside from that train and spurned the oblivion it offered. Deep down, she knew there was little chance she would have gone through with it anyway. Not with little Tommy and Molly to care for. It was just … reassuring … that was it … to know that an escape from everything was always to hand.

  Molly was in the kitchen, sitting at the table and peeling the potatoes for their tea tomorrow. A simple potato broth that would be cooked on the range beside the hearth tonight and ready for heating up tomorrow, if the little coal they had could last that long.

  Molly. In a way, she had been the start of it all, the reason Bridie was feeling the way she felt now. But then, she reasoned, Molly wasn’t the start of it. In another way Molly was the end of it.

  ‘Can you tell us about me grandma, Mam? The one about me grandma and the goat that ran away, eh!’

  Tommy’s voice broke her thoughts, and she was grateful. She could hear Molly humming happily to herself in the kitchen. It was ‘Faith of Our Fathers’. As her daughter hummed the melody, Bridie mouthed the words until Tommy turned to look up at her in encouragement.

  ‘Go on, Mam. I like that one. Then a story, eh?’

  And so Bridie sang, a slow, haunting melody that brought the old country back, and she could smell once more the early morning mist, the dampness of clothing, as they passed the Stations of the Cross on their ascent of Croagh Patrick, where Saint Patrick fasted for forty days, her school friends blessing themselves with a shy giggle hidden from the sisters; an image of herself standing before the statue of Saint Patrick himself, gazing into his eyes as he stood sublime on that holy mountain, the drizzle of Atlantic rain staining the white of his face and the pallor of her cheeks. A holy sharing. And all the while the gentle singing of the pilgrims as they made their slow progress up the mountain:

  Faith of our fathers, we will love

  Both friend and foe in all our strife.

  And preach thee, too, as love knows how,

  By kindly words and virtuous life.

  When she stopped singing, she saw Molly framed in the door to the kitchen, using the knife in her hand to conduct the next verse.

  When he was twelve, Frank Latchford had begun working down the mines, and for the first few years he worked as a drawer alongside his father in one of the Morris Collieries at Hindley, a few miles from Wigan. His work then involved heaving the loaded coal tubs along the underground roads to the cage where they would be taken to the surface for weighing and unloading. He would then push an empty tub back to begin the process all over again.

  It was in 1891 that his father died, and it had been sheer luck that Frank hadn’t died with him.

  The cage to take the men down was full and Frank watched his dad and the others go down. Thirty seconds later, they heard a terrible screeching sound as, it was discovered later, the cage had slipped from its slides and remained stuck halfway down while the ropes above continued to drop. Somehow the cage realigned itself with the slides, but by that time the rope had descended so much that it lay coiled on the cage roof. Once the cage was freed, it plummeted to the bottom, killing four of the men, including Frank’s father who suffered a fractured skull.

  The investigation by the Inspector of Mines ruled negligence against the owner, Arthur Morris, who had repeatedly ignored reports all making reference to the insecurity of the descent apparatus.

  Within a year, Frank Latchford’s mother had died, her melancholy degenerating into a prolonged and inescapable insanity.

  Both deaths affected him profoundly, and the wave of sympathy, along with his new job as checkweighman – whose duties involved weighing and recording all tubs brought to the surface, a position of trust and respect – and his natural eloquence, helped to win him election as lodge representative.

  Once he and Molly began their courtship, the sadness of the last few years had seemed to ease like the healing of a deep scar, and to Frank at least the future began to appear rosy.

  The first taste he had had of politics on the grand scale came in March, a few months before the pay dispute began. As a consequence of his growing reputation as a powerful orator and a man in whom the miners could place their trust, he was invited by the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, along with thirty-three other district representatives, to form part of the deputation to present their case for the Eight Hours Bill to the prime minister himself, the Right Honourable William Gladstone MP, at 10 Downing Street. There he met not only the prime minister, but the Secretary of State for the Home Department, the Right Honourable Herbert Asquith MP, and eighteen other Members of Parliament.

  It was heady stuff for a twenty-four-year-old.

  He was therefore disappointed when the prime minister expressed his reluctance to involve himself in what he referred to as adult labour concerns, and his distinguished colleagues all murmured their agreement. They also murmured their agreement when the grand old man went on to say that he did not rule out any future involvement, a statement Frank Latchford found contradictory at best and hypocritical at worst.

  Nevertheless, he had enjoyed the experience in London and the camaraderie that developed among the members of the deputation.

  It also helped him cope with the open wound that had pained him since Molly Haggerty had told him their courtship was at an end.

  But such thoughts were far from his mind as he walked along Greenhough Street pushing a small, but evidently laden, handcart through the thick snow.

  He reflected on the events of the morning with the satisfaction of a commander reviewing
a well-executed sortie.

  It had been like a scene from hell.

  From a distance, it had seemed that the waste tips stretched almost to the foot of the pit head frame itself. At his urging, men, women and children with their carts and their buckets and their frayed old sacks, every last one of them, knelt on all fours bending low over the rubble of waste coal and scrabbling large lumps and small lumps into their means of conveyance. In the early morning air, with the pale sun barely visible on the horizon, curses had drifted upwards like demonic prayers as fingers were cut and knuckles bruised in the desperate search for something to light the cold hearths for the next few nights. Children, some of them too drawn and malnourished to run around and play, had sat beside their mothers and fathers, their sisters and brothers, listlessly dropping whatever lumps of cannel coal they could find beneath the dusty mounds of waste into iron buckets. Black dust had brought a pallid shadow to their faces, and eyes that had once sparkled were now dulled and misted, like the wasted wick of a dying candle.

  And standing atop the largest mound, Frank Latchford had overseen the action with all the pride of a general surveying the aftermath of a successful charge.

  It had indeed been a productive morning.

  The funeral yesterday had provided many folk with a diversion, but watching such a man on his final journey wasn’t calculated to put bread on your table or warmth in your grate, so he had urged everyone he could to join him before morning light.

  He had organised the dawn raid on the Morris Colliery, taking with him over a hundred fellow miners, their wives and their children, every one of them bearing some kind of transportation from horse-drawn wagons to flimsily built trolleys on misshapen wheels, all taking the same circuitous route, and they had spread across the slag heaps, known locally as the Alps, picking coal and loading as much as they could gather for the benefit not only of themselves but also of those older and much more likely to die from the bitter cold of winter.